Are We Being Served?

This article first appeared in the Southern Daily Echo:
Customer service is flavour of the month. Last week Michel Roux Jr was on BBC2 teaching belligerent teenagers how to serve fine diners. This week Channel Four has Mary Portas Secret Shopper on a mission to improve standards of service on the high street.
For a retailer, Ms Portas’ TV programmes are required viewing. She has a proven record in shop displays and has become an expert in all aspects of retailing. The trouble with the first programme was that criticising the likes of Primark, Top Shop and Pilot was like shooting fish in barrel. Seeing staff ignore customers, overhearing them chatting about their private lives- these things are hardly shock revelations. Anyone familiar with these stories experiences this every time they go in.
I suspect the problem for many low price clothing chains is that they treat their staff with contempt and that’s passed on to the customers. Mary’s mantra of ‘Smile Speak Serve’ is quite right but too simplistic. It has to be backed up with training in customer psychology so they know when and what to say and even more importantly how to listen; product knowledge so they can genuinely help fulfil the customer’s requirements; involvement in the whole business so they understand the importance of their role in it; respect so they respect the management and customers; trust so they make the right decision for each unique customer without fear of criticism.
I know Mary’s expertise is in shop design but I think she let herself be distracted by the appearance of these cheap and cheerful shops. She criticised Primark for its queues and clothes on the floor. I suspect this is a deliberate tactic. I wouldn’t be surprised if they throw a few items on the floor themselves each morning and deliberately create queues, because it all creates an image of fast sales from frantic bargain hunters. On the other hand, even a bargain hunter may need help in finding a particular jacket or get annoyed if there’s a queue while members of staff are standing around chatting- and that does mean lost sales.
It’s all so much easier for a small family-run shop like Your Life Your Style. My wife and sister-in-law lead the staff by example. Shoulder to shoulder with employees, they greet customers, offer help when it’s needed and care about satisfying them whether that ends in a sale or not. Staff are praised when they do well and helped to improve where necessary. But big stores can do it too- look at John Lewis or Apple.
The biggest shame attaching to the owner of Pilot was not his rude staff or his shabby shop, it was the fact that his employees had never met him. How could he expect them to care about his business?

Mary Queen Of Empty Shops

Mary Portas looked at empty high streets on last night's TV. Fortunately Winchester where our shop is located is so far unaffected by the recession, although some premises in The Brooks are proving hard to fill.
Her answer to the high street woes after an hour of waffle? Work with neighbouring retailers, give the customers what they want and do it with a bit of razamataz. Good advice but did it need an hour to come to that conclusion?

Website Lets Down Mary Queen Of Shops

I was looking at the website of Yellowdoor, the retail consultancy run by Mary Portas, Queen Of Shops. I know she could transform the fortunes of the little shop my wife and I own; I know this agency is far more successful at PR than I could ever hope to be. So in a way, I feel who am I to criticise? However I have to say, their website is not very good.

See for yourself. Firstly, you have to click to get anywhere, which is always a frustration. So, click on the Retail Strategy page, though it could be any of them. The first thing you have to tackle is the tiny difficult-to-read type, made even worse because white out of brown is always going to be less easy to read that black out of white. Then there’s the counter-intuitive scrolling- the arrow at the bottom pointing down makes the page scroll to the top and the upward pointing arrow at the top takes you down. When you try to read, there are distracting photos constantly scrolling up the left hand side.

Finally perhaps the worst sin because it’s the easiest to have got right- series of typographical errors- Shopping is another scence (presumably ‘science’)… We will apply out (our) expertise. There’s no excuse for not proofing properly.

Sticking with copy but turning to the About Us page, it seems Mary Portas’ newspaper column ‘will be a launch pad for a National Shop Awards in 2006”- ‘was’ surely. You must keep your website up-to-date or your company looks inefficient and unreliable.

As happens so often, clever design has triumphed over usability. I am pretty sure that this would not be true of Yellowdoor’s retail consultancy work but a website like this just creates that little doubt.